If You Don’t Count It, You Don’t Have to Fix It
(Trice Edney Wire) – The Trump administration is not eliminating workplace discrimination. It is eliminating the receipts.
On July 23, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) proposed abolishing the EEO-1 report and five related workforce reports. For nearly sixty years, EEO-1 has required large private employers to report the race, ethnicity, and sex of their employees across major occupational categories. The information helps us see who gets hired, who advances, who remains clustered at the bottom, and who never gets through the door. Now the federal government proposes to stop collecting it.
This is far more than bureaucratic housekeeping. It is the deliberate destruction of evidence. Without data, disparities cannot be adequately documented; without documentation, discrimination becomes more difficult to prove. An administration already committed to declaring our nation colorblind will then be free to point to the absence of evidence—an absence it created—as evidence that inequality no longer exists.
First they deny inequality. Then they destroy the evidence. Finally, they declare the problem solved.
The EEO-1 report has been collected since 1966, just two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Private employers with at least 100 workers, along with certain federal contractors with at least 50, have been required to provide workforce demographic information. Approximately 110,000 employers are covered. While that is less than 2 percent of the nation’s nearly 6 million employer firms, these are among our largest employers and collectively employ a substantial share of the American workforce.
The proposed rule goes beyond private employers. It would also eliminate reports covering unions, state and local governments, public school systems, apprenticeship programs and institutions of higher education, as well as some of the recordkeeping requirements associated with those reports. The administration is not simply turning off the camera; it is also proposing to throw away the film.
The EEOC contends that these reports are burdensome, of limited usefulness and potentially unconstitutional because they classify workers by race and sex. That reasoning turns civil-rights enforcement on its head. In the twisted logic of this political moment, counting racial inequality is treated as a form of racial discrimination, while actual discrimination is rendered invisible.
Collecting information about race is not the same as discriminating by race. A thermometer does not cause a fever, nor does a scale cause weight gain. Data do not create inequality; they reveal it. Indeed, without data, claims of equal opportunity are little more than corporate advertising.
The EEOC estimates that eliminating the reporting requirements would save employers and the federal government about $278 million annually, including approximately $273 million for private employers. That sounds like a large amount until it is compared with the economic cost of workplace discrimination. Wage disparities, occupational segregation, biased hiring and blocked promotions cost workers—and the larger economy—far more than employers spend completing a report.
Furthermore, businesses already collect much of this information through their payroll and human-resources systems. The real burden may not be gathering the numbers but being held accountable for what those numbers reveal.
EEO-1 data are hardly perfect. The report does not tell us everything about pay, promotions, discrimination or workplace culture; it offers a snapshot rather than a full biography. Still, snapshots matter. They can reveal whether Black women are concentrated in administrative and support positions while white men dominate senior management. They can expose the distance between a company’s carefully worded commitment to diversity and its actual employment practices.
Such patterns do not prove every individual allegation of discrimination, but they tell investigators where to look. They allow employers to identify problems before those problems become lawsuits, while giving researchers and policymakers a way to measure progress—or the lack of it. Eliminating the data will not make workplaces more equal; it will simply make inequality easier to conceal.
This attack on EEO-1 reporting is part of a broader war on facts. The Trump administration has attacked diversity, equity and inclusion programs, weakened federal contracting protections and attempted to purge race-conscious analysis from government. It apparently wants a nation in which racial inequality may be experienced but not measured, described but not documented, protested but not proved.
Black workers know better, and so do women who continue to encounter occupational segregation and unequal opportunity. We know that fairness cannot be measured by a corporate slogan or a glossy photograph featuring a carefully assembled rainbow of employees. It must be measured by who is hired, what they earn, where they work, whether they advance and who holds power.
Data are instruments of democratic accountability because they allow ordinary people to compare promises with performance. That is precisely why those who resist accountability want the numbers buried. The proposed elimination of EEO-1 reporting is not colorblindness but willful blindness—a declaration that the federal government would prefer not to know what is happening inside American workplaces.
Inequality does not disappear when government closes its eyes. When the people charged with enforcing equal opportunity stop collecting the evidence, they are not being neutral. They are choosing concealment over accountability and darkness over the illumination that data provide.
Dr. Julianne Malveaux is a DC-based economist and author.
Based on reporting by Seattle Medium.
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